Inventive staging and meta storytelling charm, but repetition and structural looseness occasionally blunt the emotional impact.
We are housed, it seems, in a Fisher Price Activity Centre. With writer/designer Hannah Caplan’s hand-made staging, there are multitudes of textures: flaps that open, macramé cobwebs, hiding places for puppets, fuzzy felt objects, hand-stitched graffiti and dangling string. The ceiling is brushed cotton, the walls winceyette. It is soft, busy, tactile. A little Bagpuss, even.
At one point, a fleece eiderdown is unfolded to reveal a poster poem about sex, accompanied by a sudden torrent of petals.
That image becomes a neat encapsulation of Caplan’s debut play: a torrent of petals. It is winsome, inventive, and deliberately scattered.
The story follows Grace, picking through the fragments of her on-again-off-again situationship with Eli, trying to work out what went right and what went wrong. Crucially, she is doing so by writing a play as both exploration and therapy. This play, in fact.
The play’s the thing
The structure is therefore self-conscious and self-aware, with Eli required to submit to Grace’s framing of events. Occasionally, they step outside the action to interrogate plot and character – and at one point Eli rebels against his own depiction – but the power dynamic remains clear: Grace has the final say.
Caplan’s interest lies in that tension between authorship and experience. The looping structure allows for repeated meet-cutes and small variations on emotional beats, mimicking the obsessive analysis of a relationship.
When the pair sit down to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, they are repaying a hefty debt to Charlie Kaufman, king of self-referential storytelling.
At its best, this is sharp and recognisable: the awkward silences, the unsaid meanings, the circular conversations. But the same structure also proves limiting. The self-awareness occasionally tips into overworking, and the repetition can feel indulgent.
Round in circles
Douglas Clarke-Wood’s sinuous direction does much to smooth this out, keeping the action fluid and visually engaging. The easy chemistry between the leads also helps. Amaia Naima Aguinaga’s Grace is fierce, funny and quietly unravelled, while Francis Nunnery’s Eli is baffled, outmanoeuvred and entirely without malice.
In their stillest moments – sitting side by side, exchanging small smiles and shoulder bumps – the play finds its most affecting register.
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This Is Not About Me is an assured and inventive debut: a funny and self-aware piece that occasionally circles its own ideas too closely, but remains full of charm. It was an Edinburgh Fringe favourite last year and heads to New York after this run in Soho.
This Is Not About Me, runs at the Soho Theatre Upstairs until 18 April, 2026.
This review first appeared in The Spy In The Stalls.